Show HN: An interactive map of US lighthouses and navigational aids
lighthouses.appThis is an interactive map of US navigational aids and lighthouses, which indicates their location, color, characteristic and any remarks the Coast Guard has attached.
I was sick at home with the flu this weekend, and went on a bit of a Wikipedia deep dive about active American lighthouses. Searching around a bit, it was very hard to find a single source or interactive map of active beacons, and a description of what the "characteristic" meant. The Coast Guard maintains a list of active lights though, that they publish annually (https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/light-list-annual-publication). With some help from Claude Code, it wasn't hard to extract the lat/long and put together a small webapp that shows a map of these light stations and illustrates their characteristic with an animated visualization..
Of course, this shouldn't be used as a navigational aid, merely for informational purposes! Though having lived in Seattle and San Francisco I thought it was quite interesting. Nice app but it really needs to allow the user to select the lights of interest before it displays. As noted in a different thread it has a display limit of 500 points and you need to zoom in pretty tight to see anything pop up in some places, like the Great Lakes, due to huge number of lights that are in the populated list. The legend should show the color coded lights and allow the user to toggle each light type as a layer so that they can identify specific points of interest. It is functionally unusable in some areas due to the huge number of navigational buoys, etc along inland rivers and it apparently has a problem determining window extents and centering the display on the user's area of interest. If you display the entire Great Lakes region you will find that your displayed lights are along a couple of rivers in the lower left with nothing in the center of the display. If you shuffle to the north a bit and zoom another notch it suddenly fills the lower right corner, still with nothing in the center of the display. Filtering by type of light would solve a lot of that if you keep the 500 point limit. I understand that it took a lot to get this far. You are close to having a great app that I would be comfortable recommending to a friend who travels specifically to visit lighthouses. This is not that app yet but it could be. Great work. Take that next step. This reminded me of a friend of my dad’s from South Africa - Don (Donald) Devine, who bought into a the Lighthouse Depot years ago and rode the (then) lighthouse fad. It was amazing seeing this successful large scale businessman turning his attention to a family business and growing that. RIP to Don, my dad, and as I’ve just discovered, the business… You can also find a lot of this information on NOAA's nautical charts. https://devgis.charttools.noaa.gov/pod. These charts (along with radar) are what ships actually use to navigate. Here's a captain demonstrating the charts on the New York Harbor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Si_kdo6MUE Very cool. One bug I noticed though is if you continue to zoom out you lose some and then all lights. Or it's almost like it only shows the first X lighthouses? For performance reasons, it only renders the first 500. There should be a message across the bottom which shows the number shows and the total number? 59,000 navigational aids is a lot more than I expected. Nice work turning the USCG Light List into something browsable. Thank you! Neat! Unfortunately the search/informational dialog blocks almost half the screen on mobile (iOS Safari). It also gets really slow when you zoom way out (e.g. when navigating to another state) I just improved the mobile behavior a bit. Take a look and let me know if that looks any better! I was surprised to find on an old USGS map (while researching a typo in the GNIS; it turns out the National Map Team is very responsive, they fixed the typo within 48 hours of reporting it) that there used to be Coast Guard navigation lights on the Ohio River. Makes perfect sense in hindsight, just never dawned on me that they would have responsibilities on large navigable rivers as well. This is great! Interesting to see how many navigation lights there are besides the obvious ones. Very cool. I wish we could add to these if it was generated with LLM. I understand a disclosure would help, but it would make those who have spent much care and attention stand out immediately as opposed to during bug season Nothing in Michigan? The state with the most light houses out of any in the US? You know what - I completely neglected the entire Great Lakes region. Let me regenerate the data and update it. Updated it! Take a look in a few mins and you should see those Michigan lights Had noticed the same issue. Looks good now, thanks. Neat! These might be useful to integrate with: OpenStreetMap (OSM) Wiki > OpenSeaMap: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenSeaMap "Depth Data for Nautical Charts" https://github.com/osmandapp/OsmAnd/discussions/18116 On Mac Safari, holding shift and using the magic mouse to scroll up or down reverses the zoom direction. This is both right (Shift-X is the reverse of X due to convention)
But is also wrong (Shift-Scroll is the macOS gesture for scrolling on maps where Scroll alone doesn't zoom in or out). TLDR: I really wish Apple would adopt the "scroll up to zoom in" convention used by the rest of the free world. Cool app. Might want to warn about seizures and migraines, though. Some people are sensitive to flashing lights.